Cerin took different track to discover love for racing

Trainer Vladimir Cerin, a native of Croatia, took a different route to horse racing than most horsemen. He earned a graduate degree in kinesiology, the science of movement, from UCLA after relocating to Southern California in 1974.

Cerin, 67, worked with such athletes as former tennis standout Tracy Austin and Bruins basketball stars Bill Walton, Jamaal Wilkes and Kiki Vandeweghe. He enjoyed the experience.

“They’re all high-quality people dedicated to improving themselves in their sports,” he said during a telephone interview this week. “They were just good people in general.”

So why the switch to racing?

“Kiki’s dad, Dr. Ernie Vandeweghe, told me, ‘Look, if you can help people run faster and jump higher, why don’t we go get a horse?’ So I went to the track in ‘77 or ‘78 and started learning about horses,” Cerin said.

The rest is history. Kiki, Kiki’s dad and uncle, and Wilkes claimed a horse and turned it over to trainer Rafael Martinez. Cerin observed and learned under Martinez and eventually took out his own license in 1981. He saddled his first winner, Spray Cologne, the following year at Del Mar to the tune of a $61.60 parimutuel payoff.

Cerin, whose career year came in 2000 when he saddled Early Pioneer to win the Hollywood Gold Cup and his horses earned $3.7 million in purses, has enjoyed a highly productive 2022 to date.

Buoyed by a couple of sharp claims in Barraza and Mucho Del Oro, Cerin has won with 16 of his 44 starters at Santa Anita this year for a lofty 36% success rate, topped only by Chad Brown’s 38% among the nation’s top 100 trainers in earnings. He’s earned nearly $650,000 through the first quarter of this year, which is on pace to easily surpass his $1.3 million last year.

“Unbelievable,” Cerin said of his win percentage.

Ten of his victories have come courtesy of Barraza (four), Mucho Del Oro (three) and a 6-year-old named Fenestra (three), who finally reached the races last year at the ripe old age of 5.

“When you have a few horses who get hot and win, it makes it look like the whole barn is on fire, but far from it,” Cerin said. “Sometimes things go your way. We’ve had 10 seconds, too, and those were unlucky and some of the wins were lucky.”

The game has changed drastically since Cerin first broke in. Five-day race weeks (six at Del Mar) have turned into three-day weeks at Santa Anita and four at Del Mar. Santa Anita management is on record as saying it hopes to eventually return to four-day race weeks, but Cerin doesn’t see it happening because of a dwindling horse population.

“It depends on the number of horses that we have, the purse money,” he said. “We’ve had the smallest foal crop nationally in decades. It’s difficult to have racing without race horses. That’s one thing, but somebody has to buy those horses, somebody has to breed. When I started training, I think there were 54,000 foals in the early ‘80s, and now we had less than 19,000. So you’re looking at a 60-65% drop. It’s difficult to fill the race dates.”

But other than sending horses to other tracks for stakes races,

Cerin doesn’t see himself picking up and moving his business out of state.

“I think about it every day along with all the other Southern California trainers, and then I get to the track about 4:45 and by 6:40 when the sun comes up and you see the San Gabriel Mountains, you no longer think about going somewhere else,” he said. “Santa Anita has the most beautiful backdrop of any race track in the world.”

Cerin, who has won more than 1,300 races, also doesn’t see himself with another Kentucky Derby horse after his one starter, Ronton in 2000, finished 18th in a 19-horse field.

“If it happens, it happens, but I’m not going to go there with a 50-1 shot,” he said. “If my horse is not one of the three favorites, I’m not going.”

He recalls the Ronton experience with a sense of humor.

“He was part of the field and I think the field itself was a million to one,” Cerin said. “He ran like it.”

Today, with a stable of 32 (down from about 60 during his career year), Cerin downplays the critics of his sport and chooses to accentuate the positive.

“There is no better care an animal gets than at the race track,” he said. “They’re well taken care of, they’re almost never abused. I think I’ve seen one or two instances in my 40-plus years at the race track of somebody abusing the horse. Most of us won’t stand for it. People who don’t love horses and don’t take care of them, those trainers end up going out of business.”

Of the current state of the game, Cerin said: “Most of the people that are in it now are strictly in it for the love of racing.”